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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Instagram updates controversial ToS
After hearing incessant complaints from their users over their new Terms of Service regarding users photos possibly used for advertising without their consent, Instagram has once again revised their ToS to appease their users and prevent more people from leaving the service. They clarified that they never intended to sell user photos in the first place.

“Because of the feedback we have heard from you, we are reverting this advertising section to the original version that has been in effect since we launched the service in October 2010. You can see the updated terms here,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom said.

Nokia and RIM settle patent dispute

Nokia and Research in Motion recently encountered a little obstacle in their patent licensing agreement when RIM sought arbitration and argued that the agreement goes beyond cellular essentials – which meant that the Canadian company was using Nokia patents not included in the agreement. Nokia wasn’t happy with what RIM did, but the arbitration tribunal sided with the Finnish company stating that RIM was in breach of contract. The tribunal stated that RIM was “not entitled to manufacture or sell products compatible with the WLAN standard” until it has agreed to pay royalties to Nokia.

So before things got out of hand, RIM and Nokia entered into a new licensing agreement that would settle all their current patent litigations. The agreement includes a one-time payment and on-going payments, all from RIM to Nokia, but specific terms of the agreement remain confidential to the two parties.

“We are very pleased to have resolved our patent licensing issues with RIM and reached this new agreement, while maintaining Nokia’s ability to protect our unique product differentiation,” said Paul Melin, chief intellectual property officer at Nokia. “This agreement demonstrates Nokia’s industry leading patent portfolio and enables us to focus on further licensing opportunities in the mobile communications market.”

HTC to release Windows 8 tablets next year

After Microsoft snubbed HTC for the first wave of Windows 8 partners, the Taiwanese company didn’t seem to hold a grudge as they are rumored to be building two Windows 8-based tablets, which will be released next year.

HTC is working on a 12-inch and 7-inch tablet, with the latter having the feature of making calls. The tablets will have Qualcomm chips, but unlike other Windows 8 tablets that will be coming in January, the HTC tablets are expected to arrive sometime during the third quarter of next year.

Apple pulls plug on Kickstarter project

While Nokia and RIM have made amends, Apple still holds a grudge against Android as they’ve pulled a plug on a Kickstarter project that allows iOS and Android devices to be charged together. Edison Junior, the technology and design lab behind the POP portable power station, is returning the full $139,170 in funding it received from Kickstarter backers. Apple didn’t want their new Lightning port to come with other ports, such as those for Android devices, or even their old 30-pin dock ports. They want Lightning to stand on its own because they see it as something unique and shouldn’t come with any other dock.

“We are pissed,” Edison Junior CEO Jamie Siminoff told VentureBeat in an interview. “I think they are being a bunch of assholes, and I think they’re hurting their customers.

“We didn’t get a yes or a no up front. But as we kept going back and forth it was clear that it was getting harder. Then, when we saw that they weren’t even going to allow a Lightning connector and a 30-pin connector together, we knew it was over.”

About Mellisa Tolentino

Mellisa Tolentino started at SiliconANGLE covering the mobile and social scene. Over the years, her scope expanded to Bitcoin as well as the Internet of Things. SiliconANGLE gave Mellisa her break in writing and it has been an adventure ever since. She’s from the sunny country of Philippines where people always greet you with the warmest smile. If she’s not busy writing, she loves reading, watching TV series and movies, but what she enjoys the most is playing or just chilling on the couch with with her three dogs Ceecee, Ginger, and Rocky.